Hobgoblins are another of those races that I struggled to find a role for in my own campaign world of Desteon. Aren’t larger goblins just… orcs? But orcs in the current Pathfinder taxonomy aren’t goblins, they don’t have the goblin subtype, they’re a separate and distinct race. So hobgoblins are more akin to Tolkien orcs, but Pathfinder orcs are more like the post-Tolkien orcs used by everyone else in need of a savage beastman race. Which still leaves me with the question: Why are there two humanoid races that fill the same niche?

My answer is that hobgoblins are not native to my world. They are from another plane, where orcs are a goblinoid subtype. They invaded Desteon via the fey realms. That’s why there are so few of them, comparative to the number of “orc” orcs. My hobgoblins call themselves orcs, they hate being called hobgoblins, and they truly, deeply, passionately hate the creatures that have claimed their race-name. In my world, they may hate those they call “false orcs” more than they hate their hereditary enemies, the elves.

They difference in alignment works to support this alternate-reality difference as well. Orcs are chaotic evil, and just raid and pillage and wreak havoc at random. Hobgoblins are lawful evil, far more organized, prone to using siege engines and feats of engineering to carry out their detailed and plans and schemes. Their relatively small numbers also support these tactics. They can’t throw wave after wave of bodies at a fight like the orcs. They can’t afford those types of losses, or they’ll be wiped out as a race. They need to rely on secure strongholds, surgical strikes, and alliances with other races including their smaller cousins, the goblins.

Hobgoblin Hide, then, sets out to give this race a reason to exist, and to make them distinct from other races that seem to fill the same niche in a campaign world.